


Burning Bright

by RaccoonDoom



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Pre-Relationship, Sickfic, lance is surprisingly good at caring for sick people
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 16:29:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7445998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaccoonDoom/pseuds/RaccoonDoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For an anon request on my tumblr: "Can you do a klance fic where Keith is sick and Lance is surprisingly good at taking care of him despite his mood swings and bouts of delirium?" Not exactly what they requested but eh close enough.</p>
<p>The first time sickness hit the team, it hit Keith. Hard. At least it's easier to be sick when you have a team than when you're alone in the desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burning Bright

**Author's Note:**

> You know those 24 hour bugs that aren't the stomach flu, when you get super sick for a day and then you're pretty much fine after that? That's what Keith has probably. Also my reasoning for why they couldn't put him in the healing pod things is that if it heals anything alive, wouldn't it heal the bacteria or viruses infecting you, too??? Also if they just popped him in a healing pod then it wouldn't make for a very good story.

The first time sickness hit the team, it hit Keith. Hard. It was some sort of bug from the last planet they were on; Hunk and Pidge both tried to explain it in excruciating scientific detail, but Lance took to calling it Space Flu, which was much simpler and summed it up fairly well. It started with a headache that spread from the base of his skull all the way down his back, sensitive soreness leaching into his joints and muscles and skin until even the _thought_ of getting up made him want to curl up under a blanket and hide. Not that he _did_ , mind you. No, he still got up and went to breakfast with everyone else, still trained, still did what he was supposed to, albeit more slowly and painfully than usual. He had gotten sick a few times in the desert, he knew how to handle himself. He didn't want to slow the team down for something that would clear up on its own in a few days.

Or so he thought. The third day after the stupid illness started, he woke up so sore and achy that he could barely make it out of bed. His throat felt so raw that he couldn't even swallow. With a noise closer to a whimper than the groan he intended it to be, he got dressed and made his way to breakfast. The short walk had him nearly out of breath, and everyone was too busy bickering and joking that they didn't look too closely at Keith as he sat down. For once, he was grateful Hunk hadn't cooked, because no one questioned him when he didn't eat more than a mouthful of Coran's space goo.

They were supposed to spar that morning, normally one of Keith's favorite training exercises, but just the motion of standing up from the table made his head spin; he tried not to make it too obvious that he was bracing himself against the wall as he walked to the training deck. His head was pounding in time with his heartbeat, and he was freezing despite the relatively comfortable castle temperature and his short jacket. He scowled at how weak he felt and straightened up (despite the protest from literally every part of his body), trying to look normal as he walked into the room.

He must not have been faking it as well as he'd hoped; he didn't even get a chance to start training. Hunk glanced at him, did a double-take, and said "Dude, are you feeling okay? You look really pale." 

Lance and Pidge both craned their necks to look at him, Lance blurting out "You look like a vampire! Well, more than usual," and Pidge making an expression that was the facial equivalent of the word _yikes_. Shiro furrowed his brows, worried, and said "Yeah, you are looking pale. Do you have a fever?" He placed his hand on Keith's forehead before he could answer, and Keith jolted back at how cold it felt. He hunched his shoulders under their attention.

"It's just a cold, I'll be fine," he insisted.

"Maybe you should take the day off," Shiro suggested, and Keith bristled.

"What if we get attacked?!" he asked, affronted. "I'll be fine, I'll get over it in a day or two. We have to be ready."

"We're light years from the nearest Galra-occupied planet and we haven't seen anything suspicious in _days_ ,” Lance interjected. "I think Shiro's onto something. Let's all take a break!" 

Shiro gave Lance a stern glare before turning back to Keith, effectively dismissing his remark. "We can survive a few days while you take time to heal. You're not going to be ready for anything if you don't slow down and let yourself recover."

Shiro was right. So he did, as much as he hated to. 

Well, he didn't hate it _that_ much. Getting to curl up under a mountain of blankets in his room was definitely nicer than having to train or work, even if he was miserable and bored the entire time. Pidge visited him a few times and made him submit to a cheek swab‒"It's for science! We need to know what we're dealing with!"‒, Hunk came by later with something unidentifiable and delicious, and Shiro, Allura, and Coran all dropped by at different points throughout the day to check on him. Lance stuck his head in the room every few hours to throw some lame comment his way or tell him something he or Pidge or Hunk or had done or said, but he never actually came all the way into the room‒"I am not catching your space flu," he asserted, and Keith coughed dramatically in his direction, sending him bolting backwards and slamming the door panel shut. He got up a couple of times to stretch his legs and check on everyone, but the fever and aches sapped all the strength from his limbs, and he was exhausted by the time he made it back to his room. Mostly, he slept.

It was probably 3 hours after Hunk and Lance had stopped by to tell him goodnight that he woke up coughing. Every cough sent a throb of agonizing pain into his skull and made his throat feel like it was on fire, and it went on long enough that he was nearly gagging; by the time the fit subsided, he was sitting up with both hands pressed desperately to his head, trying to mitigate the pain. It felt like someone had taken every nerve ending in his body and flayed them open; even breathing hurt, from the stretch of his skin across his ribs to muscles in his back that tensed slightly as he moved. He was pouring sweat but freezing, and he could smell the sour odor of sickness clinging to his cover. He would kill for some good old-fashioned Earth Tylenol.

Everything felt off-kilter, like he was experiencing it in a dream. He couldn't even orient himself to his door, until it opened several minutes later, letting in a soft bluish glow from the hallway that seemed unbearably bright, causing Keith to squeeze his eyes shut and lie back down. It was a testament to just how sick he was that he didn't even associate the door opening with someone being there until Lance's voice went "Shit, you're awake."

Keith just groaned weakly in response, not opening his eyes. The next thing he felt was something cold pressed to the skin of his temple, followed by a short beep. He tried to swat the object away, but by the time he managed to move, it was gone.

"You're fever's getting worse," Lance said, though it sounded more like he was half talking to himself; that was fine, because Keith was only half listening. "It's at 104 now. I'm getting Shiro." As he turned to leave, Keith's fever-scrambled brain finally connected most of the information from the past few minutes, and he opened his eyes a fraction of an inch.

"Wait, have you been…checking on me?" he asked, doubtful. Mr. "I Need My Beauty Sleep and I'm Not Catching Your Space Flu" seemed like one of the least-likely candidates for late-night sickness-watch.

"Uhh, yeah, duh?" Lance turned around and replied, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "You've gotta check on sick people at night to make sure they don’t get worse and die, and _apparently_ no one else on this ship realizes that, so I guess it's my job now. Be glad my mama isn't here, she'd be waking you up every half hour to take your temperature." He said it with a kind of exasperated fondness that made Keith think he'd be a lot more glad if his mom _was_ there. 

The other half of what Lance had said caught up to him just as the other boy turned to leave yet again, and Keith reached toward him without thinking. "Wait, don't wake Shiro up, come on, man," he begged, trying ineffectively to grab onto one of Lance's wrists. "He can't even do anything about it, let him sleep." He really didn’t want to bother Shiro; their leader got little enough sleep as it was, he didn't need to get even less.

Lance heaved a dramatic sigh and glared at him, but acquiesced. "Fine, but if you die, I'm _not_ taking the blame," he said, pointing a finger at him in warning after he peeled Keith's hand from him. And, yeah, dying from space flu would be pretty lame when they all fought aliens on a regular basis. "I'll be back in a minute." With that, he left and shut the door, plunging the room back into darkness.

True to his word, though, he was back soon, and with an armload of… something. Keith couldn't really focus on it, and his higher reasoning wasn't exactly online at the moment. It was way easier to just lie back and shut his eyes and let Lance do his… whatever it was.

He jolted when something cold was pressed against his forehead, and bit back on the undignified whine he nearly made when the movement sent a flare of pain through his body. He reached up to feel… a wet rag. Like in the movies, he thought blurrily, when kids with parents got sick. They'd get a cold rag put on their foreheads, too. It felt really nice; he could almost go back to sleep like this, if Lance would stop talking. Then he realized _oh, Lance is talking_ , and cracked open his eyes as he tried to listen.

"‒but that was just when I was 9, I haven’t gotten the stomach virus since," he said, apparently finishing a story as he organized the things he had brought on Keith's bedside table. "Anyway, here, sit up and drink this," he ordered, holding a cup in one hand. 

Keith tried to push himself upright, but it was more of a challenge than he anticipated; his arms were shaky and weak, and his joints were throbbing like someone had filled them with compressed air. He was honestly surprised when Lance put a hand on his back and helped ease him into a sitting position. Keith put a hand to his head to hold the rag in place and glanced at Lance, but his expression was just mildly concerned, and he didn’t even make a patronizing comment or a pun about a leg always supporting the team or anything. It was fucking unusual. His head was too jumbled to think about it critically.

"When did you get good at this sickness stuff?" Keith asked, frowning critically at the contents of the cup; it was too dark to tell what it was. 

"I was the second-oldest of 6 kids, dude. I was _always_ on sick-watch for one of my little siblings. Now _drink_. Hydration is important."

Whatever was in the cup wasn't too awful, something that tasted like slightly salty, watered-down Gatorade, and Keith drank it despite the searing burn in his throat every time he had to swallow. Lance's hand was still on his back, rubbing small circles seemingly without realizing it. It felt surprisingly good, despite his oversensitive skin‒especially when another coughing fit hit him and left him doubled over, fresh pain stabbing through his skull and burning his throat. He sighed and slumped back until he was lying down again, even though it meant the loss of Lance's absent petting, because he was incredibly exhausted all of a sudden and wanted nothing more than to sleep. He didn't remember shutting his eyes, but he opened them when Lance rearranged the rag on his forehead, brushing his hair out of the way. He looked… worried.

The thing about fevers is that they sometimes mix you up enough that you don't know how you got from point A to point B. Keith knew that he shut his eyes with Lance's hand on his forehead. He couldn't really separate what he dreamed and what actually happened after that, but he was pretty sure that Lance humming something that sounded like a lullaby while he pressed a fresh rag to his head was real. His comm beeping something urgent was probably a dream or a hallucination, because it was on the other side of the room when he was lucid enough to look, and he distinctly remembered _thinking whatever, they'll wake me up if they need me_ , and going back to sleep. But he had no idea how he woke up with Lance half-holding him upright and rubbing his back while he coughed until he almost choked.

It was worse than the last few fits, and he slumped against Lance and squeezed his eyes shut until the molten pounding in his head subsided to a bearable throb. Any other time, he would have been a little embarrassed at his open display of weakness, but he was sick and tired and didn't feel like dealing with the rivalry bullshit at the moment. Lance seemed to get it, for once, and didn’t say anything, just pressed another cup of the not-nasty not-Gatorade into his hands.

Not that Keith would ever admit it, but it was a lot easier being sick when there was someone to take care of you.


End file.
